Pit

As a youngster my world was satisfyingly filled with a just a couple of friends, Dinky Toys, numerous plastic model kits and a Muffin the Mule string puppet, which I’m sure was made of a light metal alloy and was painted in bright colours (probably lead based paints too!) I would spend hours crawling around on my hands and knees playing with my cars, driving them around my chalk drawn roads on the street  pavement, with Terry, a friend who lived across the road, and  just as crazy, as I was. Even in these early days I had no interest in sport of any kind and I’ve no recollections of visits to the cinema, although mom always insisted that as a family we had all seen ‘Lady And The Tramp’ at the Gaumont, Wolverhampton, I’d have been seven or eight at the time. I attended a Catholic school called ‘The Holy Rosary’, for my infant and junior years, it was just a short distance away on the other side of Wolverhampton’s East Park and I always tried my best, ending up somewhere in the middle when it came to end of term exams.  I wish I could proudly report that I can remember being ushered to bed before any of the BBC Quatermass serials were broadcast, but in truth, although mom later told me that dad had watched them, I was unaware of their existence. But all that had changed in early 1960,  we were visiting  ‘Uncle Bob’ a relative of my Father, where following a short walk with their dog and a visit to their local public house for a Vimto and a packet of Nibits, we had returned to watch the first 90 minute episode of an omnibus edition of ‘Quatermass and the Pit’. Dad had been unable to say a great deal and couldn’t send me to bed or turn the TV off and had let me watch and so when it appeared that it hadn’t had any troublesome effects on my young mind I had been allowed to see the second and final, 90 minute episode the following week, at home. I can remember being very ‘troubled’ by what I’d seen, but never let on. Now of course I know this to be one of TV’s great milestones, along with another Nigel Kneale’s other Quatermass stories and the still spooky ‘The Stone Tape’.  This was another complex tale which I had watched, while sitting alone in my little bedroom at the Talbot Hotel in 1972, where I would work as a chef for a number of years, it had spooked me so much I kept the light on for a long, long time, as the hotel was supposedly haunted.